Adventures of an Aviatrix, in which a pilot travels the skies and the treacherous career path of Canadian commercial aviation, gaining knowledge and experience without losing her step, her licence, or her sense of humour.

Friday, June 26, 2009

Phases on Stun

There's been a change to our maintenance control manual. Previously we would have a minor,
half-day inspection (called a 50 hour inspection), fifty hours of flying, a major four day
inspection (called a hundred hour inspection), fifty more hours of flying and then repeat from
the beginning. Now we still have an inspection every fifty hours, but our maintenance is now
''phase based''. All inspections take two days. On one inspection they look at the left engine,
empennage and wings really thoroughly. Then on the next one it's the right engine, fuselage and
landing gear. I don't have the MCM with me, so I may not have that exact. The point is that
they distribute the work of the old 100 hour check across two inspections. The work of the old
50-hour is still done at every inspection. different inspections are called Events. There are
four events. The AME who explained it to me said that Events #1 & #3 are the same, as are
Events #2 & 4. It's not clear to me yet why they need different numbers.

We're having a company mechanic fly up to do an Event #3 while the weather is bad. Of course
the "takes two days" part assumes they don't find anything serious that requires parts.

And a couple of blogs to tell you about. I was going to work them cleverly into relevant posts, but I haven't got anything appropriate scheduled, and I don't want to forget about them.

Decision Height is updated infrequently by a senior pilot at a major airline. It includes more opinion and more of the downside to being an airline pilot than Dave's FL390 (which most of my readers are familiar with).

The other is Report on Conditions, a title generic enough to be misleading, as this is a firefighting blog. I had no idea how varied the work was. As blogger Captain Schmoe describes it, he concentrates on the human side of the job, both through empathy for the people he deals with and in discussing the decisions firefighters have to make.

5 comments:

With two pilots flying your plane, it must rack up 50 hours quickly. How often does it lose "flying time" due to these maintenance checks? I guess anything they can do to spread the work and keep 'em flying is like money in the bank.

I've thought about amending my SAMS the same way. I have held off only because I like how short the fifty hour is...The last one was done in four hours (in between flights no less).

My solution to deal with the longer 100 hr checks has been brute force. Get every engineer in the shop on the aircraft and it can take a day and a half barring snags. Where it all falls apart is when there are not enough engineers available...

sorry: I failed to put in a 'not' in my prevoius comment! I wanted to say you will probably think CZY is funny.again: sorry! the words I wanted to say are: "... and I am pretty sure you are NOT amongst those who think CZY is an inappropriate name for a navaid."